


exactly none of the usual spiteful joy

by suitablyskippy



Category: Naruto
Genre: Bodyswap, Friends With No Benefits, Friends With No Benefits Whatsoever, Gen, Teeth-Clenched Teamwork
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-03
Updated: 2015-06-06
Packaged: 2018-03-28 21:58:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3871210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitablyskippy/pseuds/suitablyskippy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I think it’s real,” Juugo says, once Sasuke shuts the door behind them. “I mean, if it isn’t, they must be… playing a joke on us, or something. And they’d have had to… talk to each other, for that. And agree with each other. And—”</p><p>Inside Karin and Suigetsu’s room, there’s the sound of something very heavy colliding with the wall. A moment later, there’s an explosion of screaming so loud that Juugo can’t imagine either of them actually understands a word the other’s saying.</p><p>“So I don’t think it’s a joke,” Juugo concludes, once the racket has died down a little.</p><p>(Karin's teeth didn't used to be this sharp. Her body didn't used to be this watery. This probably isn’t going to be resolved by the power of friendship.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

The sound of Karin kicking down a door and bellowing Sasuke’s name isn’t exactly unusual by this point, but that doesn’t make it any easier to sleep through. 

“I’m _blind_ ,” she’s howling, in the next room, “Sasuke, I fucking mean it, I can’t see for _shit_ –”

Karin resigns herself to waking up, rolls blearily over, and realises, in increasingly rapid succession, that her sheets are soaking wet, she has no immediate awareness of exactly where Sasuke’s chakra is, and that _she’s_ Karin – not whoever’s next door, currently still howling – and she kicks aside the sodden tangle of her sheets to launch herself from bed. 

There’s light spilling into Sasuke and Juugo’s room through the demolished doorway. Karin’s double is right there, wearing the clothes Karin went to bed in, brandishing a water bottle in Sasuke’s direction and threatening dismemberment with violent eloquence. 

“You!” barks Karin. 

“What the _fuck_!” wails her double, wheeling round to face her, wild-eyed and bedraggled from sleep. 

“You tell _me_ , asshole,” she says – or rather, tries to say, because she bites straight through her tongue instead. Water floods her mouth, and she doubles up choking for breath and getting only water, _more_ water, slamming a fist against her chest as she wheezes. 

“Is there a problem,” says Sasuke. He’s propped himself up on one elbow, eyes glowing red in the gloom. 

“I’m _Karin_ ,” Karin’s double says, vehemently, and grabs a handful of her own red hair as though to illustrate the point. “Fucking – _Karin_! Not Suigetsu!”

“Yes,” says Sasuke, after a moment. 

“No,” says Karin’s double, “I mean, like, _yeah_ , but –”

Karin spits out a mouthful of water that was probably at least half of some vital organ. “ _I’m_ Karin, you bastard, and if you don’t get out of my body I’m gonna –”

“Gonna what?” says her double, voice skidding shrilly up towards hysteria. “Gonna hit me?”

Her fist’s already cocked to punch; she stares at her double, and forces herself to lower it. Like hell she wants her body back with half its ribs shattered, courtesy of herself. 

“Do you think we could talk about this in the morning?” says Juugo. He’s rubbing sleep from his eyes in the futon behind Sasuke’s, his curtain-cape draped over his sheets for extra warmth; he still hasn’t grown back to the size he was before they faced the Eight-Tails, and yet everything about him seems suddenly so offensively ordinary that a lurch of infuriated envy bursts through Karin – and something happens inside her at the same time, a feeling like her stomach just – _came loose_ – swilling inside her, liquid and agitated, _repulsive_ –

“I agree with Juugo,” Sasuke says, evenly. “We have a long day tomorrow. You two should be sleeping, not fighting.”

“We’re _not_ fighting!” howls Karin’s double. “I’m fucking telling you, I oughta be Suigetsu – I _am_ Suigetsu –”

“Sasuke,” says Karin, in her most reasonable voice, which is not coincidentally also one of her most alluring voices, “Sasuke – you have to understand.” She kneels down beside his futon, and does her best to ignore the immediate downward flicker of Sasuke’s gaze. “Would Suigetsu –” she takes an accidental bite out of her tongue, spits away the water, “– touch you like _this_?”

She rests her hand tenderly against Sasuke’s cheek. 

It stays there for a moment, and then Sasuke removes it. “Yes,” he says. “Suigetsu, I don’t care if it’s the middle of the night, you don’t leave your room without clothes on. Karin, you need your sleep. Juugo and I will see you in the morning.”

Karin looks down at herself. It’s not the first time she’s seen Suigetsu naked, or the second, or probably even the hundredth, given his aggravating tendency to regard clothing as optional when in Sasuke’s vicinity, but it’s the first time from this particular angle. This particularly personal angle. Karin looks back up. Her double’s staring wildly in her general direction, red eyes unfocused without her glasses. Maybe it’s a nightmare. If the world has the slightest respect left for her, it’ll be a nightmare. 

“Sasuke,” Juugo says, jolting upright in sudden panic, “I think I’m –”

Karin lunges for the exit. Her double is already pelting down the corridor. There’s the sound of a brief squabble, abruptly curtailed by the slam of their door, and silence returns. 

“You think you’re what,” says Sasuke, after a moment. 

“Uh,” says Juugo, who is showing no signs of incipient transformation, and looking rather more bashful than monstrous, “I’m – well, I’m fine, actually. I just thought it’d make them leave.”

“Hm,” says Sasuke, and then, so gruffly it’s as though the very brief praise hurts him to deliver: “Thank you.”

 

+++

 

Dawn’s pouring in through the window when Karin wakes up, squares of thin pink light stretching out across the floorboards. The briefest of investigations tells her that she’s occupying the body of a naked man with unnecessary teeth, which presumably means that the night before was not a bad dream brought on by too much of Sasuke’s shitty cooking, and that her double, sleeping in the next futon with one arm slung across her face, is not in fact her double, but the only version of her, and more likely currently Suigetsu. 

She picks his clothes out from the crumpled pile beside his bed, and gets dressed. A sense of surreal calm has come down around her. The sun keeps on rising, almost like the world isn’t over, and slowly their room floods with honeyed sunshine. 

After a while, there’s a groan from the next bed. Suigetsu removes the arm from his face and stares blearily up at the ceiling, then sits up, and stares blearily round at Karin. “Fuck,” he says. 

“Yeah,” she says. 

“Fuck,” he says again, after a moment, and flops back down. “Don’t touch my sword.”

“I wouldn’t touch it if you paid me,” says Karin. She feels the sudden, keen loss of having enough hair to toss it back across her shoulder, and settles instead for the most dismissive sniff in her repertoire. “Put my glasses on, I’m not having you ruining my eyesight.”

“You haven’t _got_ any eyesight,” Suigetsu objects, but he does, after an unnecessarily long pantomime of patting about on the table between their beds like they’re not right there, black and obvious, and within extremely easy reach. “You’re blind,” he informs her, squinting about the room. “No wonder no one ever taught you to fight, you can’t see for shit. You’re a liability. I’m telling Sasuke you should be off the team.”

“I’ll consider it,” says Sasuke, deadpan – and at the sound of him, and the completely unexpected sight of him, Karin startles so violently she liquefies. 

Suigetsu’s regaled them before with tales of how he couldn’t keep a reliably solid state until he was four years old, but Suigetsu’s been an idiot since birth and Karin has an incomparably sophisticated understanding of chakra flow. She gets the trick of it in minutes, and pulls herself together just in time to see Juugo appear behind Sasuke in the doorway, half-dressed with his toothbrush in hand, half-sized with his curtain trailing on the floorboards behind him. 

“Before you say anything,” Karin begins, but Suigetsu is laughing so hard he’s making her own voice sound insane, so she hurls his own water bottle at his head and raises her voice loud enough to drown him out, “before you say _anything_ , Sasuke – it’s because you took me by surprise. Because _usually_ , I know where you are.”

Sasuke says nothing. 

“ _Exactly_ where you are,” Karin stresses. “At _all times_. No matter _what_. Even if I’m a hundred miles away I can still –”

“What was last night about,” Sasuke interrupts. He’s still watching her, the wheels of his sharingan slowly turning. 

“Last night?” says Karin, whose train of thought has already derailed into close study of Sasuke without his chakra, his form unlit, his energy hidden, the pulse at his very _core_ closed off to her –

“I’m Suigetsu,” says Suigetsu, “and that’s Karin, and we dunno what the fuck’s going on, we didn’t touch any cursed-looking swords or anything – didn’t touch _any_ swords, actually, which might be the problem now I think about it –”

“You’d think you could stop obsessing about swords for _once_ in your life,” Karin interrupts, “given the _emergency situation_ –”

“You’d think you could stop obsessing about Sasuke for _once_ in your life,” Suigetsu mimics immediately, “given the _emergency situation_ –”

“He’s team leader, dumbass! What the hell am I gonna do? Ignore him?”

“Or just, like, don’t literally _melt_ when you see him?” A sudden look of delight spreads across Suigetsu’s face – across _Karin’s_ face, which has never looked so unremittingly fucking stupid before in her entire life – and a feeling of pre-emptive fury boils up inside her. Whatever he’s about to say, he’s almost certainly going to regret it. “Would you say that’s the wettest you’ve ever got for Sasuke, or...?”

The fury boils over. With a cry of outrage, she launches herself across the beds between them. 

“Juugo,” says Sasuke. 

Juugo follows him obediently into the corridor. “I think it’s real,” he says, once Sasuke shuts the door behind them, though Sasuke hasn’t asked for his opinion – only stared at him blankly, but that’s how Sasuke asks for most things, nowadays. “I mean, if it isn’t, they must be... playing a joke on us, or something. And they’d have had to... talk to each other, for that. And agree with each other. And –”

Inside Karin and Suigetsu’s room, there’s the sound of something very heavy colliding with the wall. A moment later, there’s an explosion of screaming so loud that Juugo can’t imagine either of them actually understands a word the other’s saying. 

“So I don’t think it’s a joke,” Juugo concludes, once the racket has died down a little. 

Sasuke looks at him a moment longer. Then he nods, briefly, and steps back inside the room. Someone who looks like Karin is trying to buckle Suigetsu’s sword harness tight enough to fit around their waist. Someone who looks like Suigetsu is offering their loud, jeering commentary on the process. The bedside lamp is shattered on the carpet; at least one futon seems to have been ripped apart. 

“We can’t afford to waste time,” Sasuke says, his voice raised above the noise. “If it’s a jutsu tied to the location, then travelling will take us outside its range.”

“And if it’s not?” Suigetsu demands. 

“It’s a cold day,” Sasuke continues, blandly. “Get your cloaks. We’ll be leaving in fifteen minutes.”

“Oi! Sasuke, I _said_ , what if it’s _not_ –”

Sasuke’s gone. Juugo hesitates for a moment, looking between them; then he tightens his grip on his toothbrush and darts after him. 

“This is your fault,” Karin announces. “You talk so much shit that Sasuke can’t even trust you anymore. He doesn’t even _listen_ to you anymore.”

“Not like he listened to you either, though,” says Suigetsu. He’s trying to lift his sword; he’s failing miserably, but Karin’s feeling exactly none of the spiteful joy she’d usually be feeling at the sight of Suigetsu failing miserably to do something. She can hardly mock him for it when it’s _her_ body that’s giving him the trouble, and her mood is getting sourer by the moment. 

The handle of the sword lifts half an inch off the ground – Suigetsu drops it with a crash and steps back, breathing hard. “I hate being this weak,” he says. “How the fuck do you even live with yourself? I bet Sasuke doesn’t know how weak you are. I bet he’d never have asked you on the team, if he knew. I bet –”

She shoves him aside; she takes the sword. It’s not even _difficult_ – it’s a fucking stupid shape and unwieldy as hell, but it may as well be carved from chipboard and painted silver for all the effort it takes to lift it. “ _I’ll_ carry it –” and before he can object: “Look, we both know I’m not gonna _enjoy_ it. Give me that harness.”

He throws her a look of purest resentful hatred as he begins to unbuckle it. Like hell if Karin would ever admit it, but in that moment even she has to concede that he’s indistinguishable from the real Karin. 

 

+++

 

Sasuke and Juugo meet them outside the inn, their cloaks fastened against the chill of the mountain foothills. Juugo’s still hardly as tall as Sasuke while he’s standing at his side, wearing his curtain folded over to keep it from dragging on the ground; for the first time ever, Karin can see the top of his wildly scruffy head. If Sasuke’s hood wasn’t raised, she’d even be able to see the top of _Sasuke’s_ head – and while usually she’d have the energy to appreciate the ominous and darkly striking figure that he cuts against the morning skies, sleek and black and hooded, she’s just not feeling it today. 

“...Karin?” It’s Juugo, sounding uncertain. “Is that still you?”

“Unfortunately,” she says. 

Juugo nods. “I was just wondering,” he says. “Because of,” he gestures up, behind her, “the sword. Um. Suigetsu’s sword. Which you’re carrying. Even though it’s his.” 

“This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” announces Suigetsu, and pulls Karin’s cloak closer around himself. He’s already been complaining of the cold, but he’s gonna keep on suffering from the cold for exactly as long as he refuses to sit down and pull her stockings on as well. “I lived in a fishtank for three years, and this is still the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. Let’s just get the fuck out of here, I don’t wanna hang around.”

Sasuke looks between the three of them. “Hm,” he says, at last, and turns away. “We’re going higher into the hills. Don’t make trouble.”

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

Technically, it’s a pleasant day for travelling. The sky is bright, the air is cold; the steep path is sometimes scattered with rattling shale, but it’s hedged in by gorse just starting to flower, and the view across the valley is clear and endless. 

In every other way, it’s a fucking terrible day for travelling. 

“—I know you can’t see anyone chasing us, I can’t see anyone either, that’s the _point_ – listen,” and Karin makes an almighty effort to lower her voice back into an undertone. Inside her cloak, her hands have clenched into fists of their own accord. “Listen, asshole, it’s _my_ jutsu, it’s _my_ body, I _know_ you can feel chakra.”

“I don’t wanna learn your weird stalker techniques,” Suigetsu informs her. “I don’t know why you think I _do_ , but I don’t.”

She breathes in. She breathes out. She doesn’t punch him in the face with all her strength, but only because she’d shatter the lenses of her own glasses and probably blind herself. “We can’t leave this team without a sensor,” she says. “It’s not _difficult_ – look, if you shut your eyes, you’d know I was here.”

“Yeah, obviously, cos you never shut up.” Suigetsu casts her an aggrieved look, and steps pointedly away from her side. “Karin, listen, can you give me some space here? It’s kinda hard for me to see you walking around like that. We both know you got the better end of the deal, you don’t need to rub it in.”

The urge to attack is growing almost overwhelming. She clenches her fists so tightly that water spills into the palms of her hands, and storms ahead to catch up with Juugo. 

“...Karin? Is everything all ri—”

“He’s an asshole and I hate him,” she announces, “and when I think of him inside my body it makes me _sick_.”

From further down the path, Suigetsu hollers up: “What about when you think of Sasuke inside your body?” and the growl of fury she lets out is entirely involuntary. 

“I’m not sure why you’re telling me this,” says Juugo, who had been occupying himself quite contentedly until now by squinting out at the specks of birds wheeling in the distance: but Karin doesn’t care. She’s suffering, and she has no plans to suffer alone. 

 

+++

 

They stop for lunch on a rocky embankment that slopes up from the main path. The experience of eating with filed teeth has already proved itself inconvenient, disgusting, and fraught with pointless danger: which means it’s much like dealing with Suigetsu himself, and therefore nothing Karin can’t handle. Without thinking, she sits down beside Sasuke; without thinking, Sasuke shifts away. 

He doesn’t shift far – only enough to separate her hip from his, enough to ensure they won’t bump elbows while they eat – but pressing her hip against Sasuke’s is Karin’s favourite part of stopping for lunch, and if she can’t bump her elbow against his while she eats, her food may as well be ninja clay for all the enjoyment she’s gonna get from it. 

She glares at him. She shifts closer. 

Sasuke shifts away again. 

She shifts closer again. 

“Suigetsu,” begins Sasuke – and just as Karin lets out a cry of outrage he cuts himself off, frowning deeply, and laces his fingers to press them against his mouth in intense and sudden thought. 

A little further down the embankment, Suigetsu himself has glanced up at the sound of his name. It’s only been half a day, but already Karin feels strained to nearly breaking point by the effort of not causing physical harm to _anyone_. “Sasuke,” she says. “I am _not_ Suigetsu. I thought you knew that. I thought you _understood_ that.” 

Sasuke looks at her sideways. “Yes,” he says, after a moment. 

Karin waits. Sasuke says nothing. “Well?” she demands. 

He keeps on saying nothing. 

“Sasuke –”

“Maybe I should stay away from both of you,” says Sasuke. “Until it’s over. To save on confusion.”

“There _is_ no confusion,” says Karin, but she’s accepted her defeat. “Fine.” She gathers up her lunch along with her dignity, and moves an arm’s width away from him. “ _Fine_. Some team leader _you_ are – can’t even keep your own teammates straight. Your strategy better be less ignorant than you are.”

“Hm,” says Sasuke, and nothing else – but Karin’s an expert by now in Sasuke’s wide range of unhelpful grunts, and that one was mildly insulted enough to satisfy her. 

The lunch break returns to uneasy silence. Sasuke is still very nearly close enough for her to feel his body heat, but with his chakra hidden, with her sixth sense gone, she really has no other choice than to pay him a little more attention than usual – to compensate for what she’s missing, to familiarise herself with Sasuke without the heat of his chakra – to work around her handicap, the same way as if she’d lost her sight: forced to relearn his familiar form by sound and smell and touch and taste alone... 

“Hm,” says Karin. She casts a sideways look at Sasuke, and involuntarily attempts to adjust a pair of glasses that aren’t there. On the topic of exploring Sasuke by touch and taste alone, there’s a lot for a woman to consider. 

A thoughtful silence descends. 

The thoughtful silence comes to a jarring halt some sixty seconds later, at which point the Sasuke of her idle daydreams sheds the last of his clothes and Karin realises, with a jolt of sudden, visceral horror, that entertaining discreet erotic daydreams in Suigetsu’s body means it’s Suigetsu’s body that she’s turning on: which is a realisation so incredibly appalling that it takes her a moment to even reengage her brain, let alone to yank her travelling cloak across her lap for safety. There is _nothing_ discreet about this; and discreet erotic daydreaming is her chief stress-release, right up there with committing violent injury against Suigetsu – and if she can’t commit violent injury against Suigetsu, and she can’t get herself off – can’t even discreetly _think_ about getting herself off –

“What are you doing?” Suigetsu says, suddenly. He twists around to peer suspiciously up at her; Juugo glances around as well, and then Sasuke follows their look, and the furious heat of her bad temper banks higher and higher still. “There’s – I can feel some weird shit. Coming from you. What the hell are you _doing_?”

Karin only realises she’s grinding her teeth when she tastes water. “Fuck off,” she says. 

“Can you feel that?” he demands of Juugo, who shakes his head. “Sasuke, can _you_ —” but Sasuke just blinks at him, as unresponsive as ever. “It’s, like – sick. It’s making _me_ feel sick.” His tone becomes more accusing still, face screwed up in revulsion. “What the hell are you doing? If you’re –”

Whatever he’s about to threaten, it’s lost on her: she liquefies. 

It’s exactly as difficult for a puddle to maintain a state of arousal as she’d hoped, and Karin pulls herself back together, dripping wet, in a pile of suddenly empty, saturated clothes and glowers back at him. “It’s chakra. I _told_ you you could feel chakra – you pissed me off, and you felt it in my chakra.”

“You’re always pissed off, though,” Suigetsu says, unconvinced. 

“Fuck you, I am _not_ —!”

“We’re leaving,” interrupts Sasuke: and so they do. 

 

+++

 

The dawn comes early in the mountains and so does evening, a gloomy twilight already moving up the sky hours before they’re due to rest for the day. Sasuke’s in the lead, trudging up the steep path in silent determination, his cloak billowing out in silhouette around him. Juugo has fallen victim to the curse of Suigetsu’s attention, though he inexplicably doesn’t seem to mind, and there’s a hushed conversation going on about identifying the calls of the first night birds that Karin’s doing her very best to ignore. There’s nothing to preoccupy her: but without her sense for chakra, she’s still startled when the ambush comes. 

It’s not much of an ambush. Two Cloud-nin spring out from behind a bush, which is far more insulting than it is threatening; the pair of them are tired and grimy from travelling, and in moments the quiet mountain path is ringing with the hard sound of Sasuke’s katana striking metal. The threat is minimal; Sasuke’s response is immediate; it’s not worth getting involved, and the three of them hang back, out of the way, Juugo shifting uncomfortably as the first of the Cloud-nin takes a blunt hit to the skull and goes down—

The world turns grey: suddenly and completely, and very nearly opaquely. 

A Cloud-type concealment jutsu, probably, which means there’s something _to_ conceal – the surge of the rest of the ambush? – and even as she thinks it, further up the path there’s all of a sudden a hell of a lot more clashing metal, more footsteps, more voices. 

Instinctively Karin presses her seal together, eyes closed, feeling for the attackers’ locations –

Nothing. The air is heavy with moisture; her body is trying to melt into it, and it’s revolting. Somewhere to her side, there’s the sound of light, quick footsteps – it’ll be Juugo, running to Sasuke. Definitely not Suigetsu, because he’s right there: a vague, blurred shape in the cloud, frozen in the act of reaching for a sword that isn’t there. 

“Fuck,” he says. He drops his hand. “ _Fuck_ – Karin, listen, tell me your top five killing moves, okay? Quick as you can.” 

“I don’t have any,” she says. “We’ve been on this team for months, how have you not noticed? I don’t _have_ killing moves.”

From somewhere in the grey depths of the cloud, Sasuke calls Suigetsu’s name. 

“Yeah,” he calls back, bright and brittle, “yeah, just a sec, Sasuke, just having some issues over here –” He drops his voice. “What the hell do you mean, you don’t have killing moves? How the fuck do you kill people? Or – _almost_ kill them, whatever, how the fuck do you _fight_?”

“I don’t! I get _you_ to do it,” she says, her voice a furious whisper. “I’m the brains of this team, you’re the brawn, that’s how it works. That’s how the whole team works, are you fucking stupid?”

“Are you for real? Are you actually—?” The sound of her own voice skidding up into hysteria. “Oh, my God, you’re even more useless than I thought, why the hell does Sasuke keep you around? What’s the point of you? Is it just to piss me off?” 

Juugo’s bellow rises up, reedier than usual from his undersized lungs in his undersized chest. “Karin! We can’t see anything up here –”

“I tried to tell you about my jutsu but _did_ you listen? _Did_ you fucking listen?” She’s trying not to get violent, but she shoves him and forgets her strength, and there’s a thump and a wheeze of breath as he hits the ground. “Just wait till Sasuke realises you let us get ambushed, idiot, _you’re_ the one who’s gonna be out on his ass—”

The chittering sound of Sasuke’s chidori kicks off, getting louder, getting faster – there’s a flash of light and a grunt of pain, and then there’s silence. 

Abruptly, the cloud clears away. 

Half a dozen Cloud-nin lie sprawled across the path. Juugo takes a step back, startled by the sudden view, and nearly trips over one of them. Sasuke releases his grip on the guy he just knocked out; the unconscious body hits the dirt with a heavy thud, and he rubs his forearm briefly across his reddened eyes with a tired grace that’s the kind of thing a woman could really learn to appreciate – Sasuke weary from vigorous physical activity, Sasuke looking kind of damp from the rain-soaked insides of the cloud, Sasuke probably at least a _little_ chakra-depleted – what Karin wouldn’t give to have her jutsu back right now, to conduct a more thorough study of his exhausted form – Sasuke lowering his arm, and turning that red gaze _directly onto her_ –

“Where were you both,” says Sasuke. 

“It was her fault,” Suigetsu says immediately, and at the same time Karin says, “It was his fault,” and the ensuing explosion of extreme mutual offence-taking is so very loud that Sasuke’s demand for silence goes entirely unheard. 

Sasuke resheathes his sword and goes over to Juugo, who’s sitting in the dirt with his hands flattened on the chest of one of the fallen Cloud-nin. “When will you be back to normal,” says Sasuke. 

“I’m not sure,” says Juugo. The fallen Cloud-nin is starting to look sunken in the face, muscle melting away beneath his skin. Juugo is starting to look sturdier, already growing broader in the shoulders. “I haven’t really – I mean, I _have_ made myself grow back to normal before – Kabuto made me do it, sometimes, but...” He trails off, frowning in concentration. He’s focusing as hard as he can on the shallow rise and fall of the Cloud-nin’s rapidly narrowing chest. “I haven’t done it without supervision. Or – without killing someone... But I’m not going to kill anyone today,” Juugo says, looking quickly up at Sasuke. 

“Hm,” says Sasuke. He doesn’t look disgusted – though absorbing someone’s body mass is really quite disgusting, so Juugo wouldn’t have blamed him if he had – but it’s reassuring that he doesn’t, all the same. “We’ll travel another hour before we camp. We have to talk about this.”

The Cloud-nin’s muscle has wasted down to nearly nothing, but the damage isn’t irreversible: Juugo’s sure he’ll be able to build it back with training. “Okay,” he says, and he clambers to his feet, several inches taller than he had been and a little wider in the chest. 

“Karin,” Sasuke says, his voice raised. “Suigetsu. We’re leaving.” 

The argument has evolved into an impassioned debate over whether Karin still retains the right to call Suigetsu a second-rate wannabe kappa piece of shit. At Sasuke’s voice, the impassioned debate subsides. 

“Insults about water aren’t even _insulting_ if I’m not water,” Suigetsu informs her, under his breath. 

“I don’t give a shit,” Karin informs him, and yanks a handful of red hair the moment he moves ahead of her.

 

+++

 

Camp is set and the fire’s burning low by the time Sasuke brings it up: which he does from nowhere, occupied by charring a fish on a spit across the flames, his voice an unreadable monotone. “You’re on this team because your abilities are useful to me. If you can’t use your abilities, then half of this team is useless to me.”

“Oh, come _on_ ,” says Suigetsu. He jabs his thumb at Juugo, whose expression turns apologetic. “More than half the team. Three-quarters of the team, at least.”

“Hm,” says Sasuke, which could mean just about anything but, realistically, probably means _shut the fuck up and leave the team forever, Suigetsu, and on your way out you can book me and Karin in for a dirty weekend away together at the fanciest inn your pathetic savings can afford—_ “I want you to train each other.”

Karin’s fantasies go up in smoke. “You’re not serious.”

“He’s _always_ serious,” says Suigetsu. “When have you ever heard Sasuke tell a joke? I don’t think he even knows what they are. I’m not doing it, anyway.”

“You are,” says Sasuke. 

Karin’s taking a breath to yell when Juugo intervenes. “What if that might be it?” 

She lets her breath back out. “ _It_?” she says, suspiciously. 

“The way to cure it,” says Juugo. He seems to notice that all three of them are listening, and averts his gaze from the campfire, looking uncomfortably towards the trees. “I mean – if you work together. And listen. And have to – um... talk nicely to each other?”

Suigetsu hoots with laughter. Even Sasuke’s usual deadpan has quirked an eyebrow. 

“That is _not_ how ninjutsu works,” says Karin. 

Juugo nods, in resigned acceptance; but he frowns back into the campfire. “The thing is,” he begins, after a moment, “when I was – um. Young? I heard a story about this.” 

“Storytime?” says Suigetsu, whose mood seems to have rocketed up into some kind of crazed, malicious glee. “Great, I’ll go next, I’ve got this horror story about what it’s like when you get your dick stolen by some selfish teammate you knew you never should’ve trusted –”

“Bastard, don’t make it sound like I _wanted_ it!”

“Stop it,” says Sasuke. He looks at Karin, his red stare unblinking. Reluctantly, Karin replaces the flaming branch back into the campfire. “And you,” Sasuke adds. Reluctantly, Suigetsu drops the kunai back into its bag. “Okay. We’re listening, Juugo.” 

“Well,” says Juugo, after a moment. “It was about. Two people, um – who swapped bodies. Like –” 

“Don’t even _try_ to lie,” Suigetsu whispers at Karin, leaning in across the fire, “you’re just mad you got someone’s dick but it wasn’t _Sasuke’s_ –”

Peace doesn’t return until Juugo yells a panicked reminder that Karin is much more flammable than Suigetsu, and if she attacks him with a flaming branch while he’s occupying her stolen body then matters are going to end much more brutally and irreversibly than usual; and she drops her flaming branch back into the campfire once again and sits back down, glaring at him across the fire, drawing a threatening line across her throat. 

“They swapped bodies,” says Juugo, who’s shuffled over to sit a little closer to Sasuke than he had been. “And then they swapped back. When – um...” 

“When what?” demands Suigetsu. “Juugo, c’mon. When _what_?” 

“When they understood each other,” Juugo says, all in a rush. “They had to understand each other and then they, it was over. So.”

No one says anything at all, for a little while. The fire crackles. A night bird hoots somewhere, and then Suigetsu makes a sound that’s far too cheerful for Karin’s liking. “Shouldn’t be hard, I know _everything_ about Karin.”

“You don’t,” she says at once, scornfully. “You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know the _first thing_ about –”

“Sasuke,” he says promptly, pitching his voice higher to mimic her even though he _has_ her voice, “and chakra – and Sasuke, more Sasuke, glasses, being a bitch, more Sasuke, picking on Suigetsu, Sasuke –”

“I do _not_ think about glasses!” says Karin, flustered enough that she involuntarily tries to adjust a non-existent pair anyway, and the resultant cry of laughter is so loud and jagged that Juugo winces to hear it. 

“It doesn’t matter,” says Sasuke. Silence falls. Sasuke pauses to carefully extract a bone from his mouthful of burned fish; the silence drags out. “You’re training each other anyway. You’re useless if you don’t.”

Karin doesn’t want to be the kind of person who lets folktales get the better of her otherwise faultlessly clear and rational thinking. But Karin doesn’t want to be the kind of person who liquefies every time she loses focus, either. “Fine,” she says. “But it’s a stupid idea, and that is _not_ how ninjutsu works.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The next part is nearly finished, and should hopefully be posted before long! In the meantime, I'm [over here on tumblr](http://www.uzumakiwonderland.tumblr.com/), and any comments would be appreciated. ♥]


	3. Chapter 3

 

“Maybe it’s a sex thing.”

There are probably worse ways to be woken up, but right now Karin can’t think of any. “Fuck off,” she says, and buries her face in her arms. 

“I’m serious,” Suigetsu insists. “What if it’s, like – understanding each other... _through sex_?”

Karin ignores him. On the other side of the campfire’s charred remains, Sasuke is folding up his sleeping roll. Juugo is contemplating a half-eaten protein bar. She sits up and pulls her travel bag towards her, fishes through its contents. 

“I mean, it couldn’t hurt to try,” Suigetsu begins, optimistically. “That’s all I’m saying, it couldn’t hurt to _try_ —”

Karin finds the kunai she’s looking for. “One more word,” she says. She seizes a handful of white hair and presses the blade against it. “One more word, you just fucking _dare_.”

He stops mid-sentence. After a moment he shuts his mouth, and then he scowls at her. 

It’s reminded her of something, though she wishes it hadn’t. She sets the kunai aside and goes rummaging back inside her bag. Awake for two minutes, and already she’s suffering worse than anyone in the world has ever deserved to, already her patience is strung out to the very, very taut brink of snapping... “Take this,” she orders, and shakes out a single green pill from the small bottle she’s retrieved. 

Suigetsu wrinkles his nose. “What is it?”

“What does it look like, dumbass? It’s medication. Take it.”

“Medic—what the _hell_?” He jolts upright in his sleeping roll, outraged. “You know what happened the last time you gave me medication?”

“Keep your voice down, asshole!”

“Me neither,” he continues, just as loud, “because I woke up like two days later and the water in my tank felt weird. And Orochimaru was there. And I think you’d, like – sieved out my _kidneys_ or something. So excuse _me_ ,” he says, getting louder still – and Karin gives up entirely, kicking her way out of her sleeping roll with determined thoughts of murder in her heart, “Excuse _me_ – if I’m not gonna take whatever random pills you feel like giving me. Excuse _me_ if I’ve got some fucking _trust issues_ with you and pills, okay, you and pills and _Kabuto_ —”

Karin claps her hand across his mouth and cuts off the flood of bullshit manually. “Take it or you’re gonna start bleeding.”

Suigetsu’s expression is more bemused than any her face has ever worn before. With a look of warning she removes her hand, and immediately he blurts out, “Are you threatening me?” 

“Are you kidding?”

“You’re the one who’d better be kidding,” he says heatedly, “why the fuck am I gonna be _bleeding_? Did you poison me? Cos if you’ve given me an injured body to deal with, that’s the kinda thing you got to _tell_ a—”

The single, solitary bonus of her newly-acquired strength is that it’s very easy to knock him down, sit on him, and pinch shut his nose until he takes her medication and staves off the risk of mid-mission menstruation for another day. 

By the time Suigetsu’s coughing fit finally subsides, Sasuke has disappeared into the trees and Juugo has settled down beside the ashes of the campfire, scratching between the tufted ears of a rangy-looking wildcat. He watches as Karin packs her bag, and begins, uncertainly, “I heard—”

“You didn’t,” says Karin. 

Relief washes over Juugo’s expression. “Okay,” he says, and returns his attention to the wildcat. 

Sasuke emerges from the trees before long. His hair is damp with river water, slicked back and gleaming black in the early morning sunshine; his shirt is hanging loose around his waist. “There’s a—” 

“Put your shirt on.” 

Silence. After a moment, Sasuke starts again. “There’s –”

“I said _put your shirt on_ ,” says Karin, lifting her voice, and when no response is forthcoming she wrenches her glare up from its very focused, very fixed concentration on the ashes of the campfire and finds all three of them staring at her. “What?” she snaps. “You wanna get sunburn? _You_ ,” to Suigetsu, who recoils from her fury in alarm, “you wanna _heal_ him if he gets sunburn? Put your shirt on, I’m not saying it again.” 

Sasuke looks at her a moment longer. Karin glowers back. “Hm,” he says, at last, and finally – _finally_ – he pulls his shirt back on. There’s still the issue of the wide pale wedge of chest it leaves exposed, but it solves the issue of water from wet hair sliding down his neck, down the shifting muscles of his shoulders, down into the hollow at the small of his back and leaving the kind of slow damp trail behind that _any_ woman in her right mind would dream of following with her— 

Abruptly Karin yanks her travel cloak across her lap. Somewhere, _somewhere_ , deep down in the furthest recesses of her imagination, untouched for years and thoroughly out of use – somewhere, she _must_ have a store of unarousing daydreams. It’s just a matter of finding them. 

“There’s a clearing to the west,” says Sasuke. “For training. We’ll stay in the area until noon. This way,” and he jerks his head as though he expects to be followed, and turns away. 

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Suigetsu demands, pausing beside her on his way after Sasuke – but Karin ignores him. Her mood has hit the foulest, most tar-black depths imaginable. Her eyes are closed, her fists clenched tight; she’s thinking furiously of all the _least_ erotic fantasies she’s entertained recently, most of which involved ruthless violence and Suigetsu himself, and she’s not about to spare a single word for the object of those fantasies until her thoughts have been purged as wholesomely clean as they’re going to get. 

 

+++

 

Sasuke’s idea of training involves Sasuke sitting on a large rock, his chin propped on his fist, gazing enigmatically out across the forested mountainside while his team are left to their own devices. It’s not the most sophisticated training technique. It’s not the safest training technique, either, and it lasts ten explosive minutes before Sasuke concedes that his supervision might be necessary. 

With Sasuke’s supervision, training lasts half an hour before Sasuke concedes that at least one member of the team will end up killed if this continues, and that the murder might just be at his own hands. 

“I _told_ you,” says Karin, who took very little time to discover the appeal of haphazardly brandishing a giant sword at anyone who dared to either irritate her or just venture within reach. Currently, the sword is planted horizontally in the dirt. Suigetsu is flat on his back, trying not to decapitate himself on its sharpened notch; Karin is sitting on the blunt edge. “I told you it was useless. I told you _all_ of this was useless. I told you it—”

“I told him first,” Suigetsu interrupts. “Listen, Sasuke, she wouldn’t have caught me if this useless _body_ wasn’t so slow, okay – it’s _Karin’s_ fault she caught me—”

“Damn right it’s my fault,” says Karin, victorious. 

Sasuke surveys the scene. Then he lifts his head, and equally expressionless he surveys the tall pine trees beyond. “We’re going,” he says, at last. 

“Are you going to—” _let Suigetsu up,_ Juugo begins to say, but Sasuke has already turned to leave and Karin is following after him. “All right,” he says, mostly to himself, and heaves the sword up from its place embedded in the ground. 

“Be careful with that,” Suigetsu says sharply, instead of _thank you_ , and gives Juugo a deeply suspicious look from behind Karin’s glasses as he gets to his feet. 

Sasuke’s already back on the main path, stone-faced. “I told you it was a stupid idea,” says Karin. She’s following so close she’s nearly stepping on his heels. “I told you and you didn’t listen to me. You _should_ listen to me, I know what I’m talking about.”

“Hm,” says Sasuke. 

“Are you gonna make us try again?” says Suigetsu. 

“No,” says Sasuke. 

“But—” begins Juugo. 

“It’ll wear off,” says Sasuke. 

“What if,” says Juugo, and stops, as though anticipating interruption. None comes. Warily, he starts again. “What if – it doesn’t? Wear off?”

Sasuke says nothing. The line of his shoulders is tense. His hands flex into fists at his sides. 

With a sudden cry of alarm, Suigetsu reels a few stumbling steps backward. “What the _fuck_ —! Did you guys feel that?”

Sasuke continues saying nothing. Karin says nothing too, purely out of principle, the principle being _ignore Suigetsu whenever possible_. The answer falls to Juugo, who says, “Uh,” and then says, “...No?” and then says, cautiously, “Did we feel what?”

“The, like –” A vigorous, incoherent gesture. “From Sasuke. Did you seriously not—? It got really hot. Like, inside me, but from Sasuke.” Juugo’s shaking his head. Sasuke’s expression doesn’t change. “What, it was just _me_?” Suigetsu says, incredulously – and then his footsteps stop. 

Karin doesn’t need to turn around to know there’s an accusing glare directed at her back. “It’s chakra.” 

“Like hell it’s chakra! I know what you’re like, you fucking pervert, like _hell_ it’s chakra!”

“You pissed Sasuke off and you felt it in his chakra—” her voice rapidly rising, “—so fuck you, it _is_ chakra, and I think I know how my _own jutsu_ works—”

“Oh, come _on_ , Sasuke’s making me feel weird and you’re seriously gonna tell me it’s some jutsu shit? Get real, Karin, we both know what’s going on here. You’re sick, you know that? You’re fucking disrespectful. Sasuke, tell her she’s disrespectful.”

Sasuke doesn’t. Sasuke has come to a stop, his hand laid on the hilt of his sword, staring into the middle distance with a look of haunted, sleep-deprived preoccupation. 

“ _Sick_ ,” says Suigetsu, as though emphasising his point stops his point from being total bullshit to begin with. It _is_ chakra: it’s hardly Karin’s fault that she’s a little more sensitive to the sweeping, darkly passionate drama of Sasuke’s moods than anyone else’s. “ _Sick_.”

Sasuke lets out his breath in one long exhale. “We’re leaving,” he says to Juugo, even as Karin wheels around and launches herself back down the path after Suigetsu, a cry of: “You’re a piece of shit and Sasuke _knows_ it—” streaming back like a banner in the wind. 

“Shouldn’t we,” says Juugo, “uh,” and he waves a hand in the direction of the blasting, deafening rage of the conversation taking place a little further down the path. 

Sasuke shrugs one shoulder. It’s a jerky, short-tempered gesture. “They’ll catch up,” he says. He doesn’t sound particularly pleased by the thought. 

 

+++

 

It’s late before they break to eat that night, mosquitoes humming round the glow of the lamp inside the shabby little yakiniku joint they stop at. Suigetsu’s taken too large a portion, and Karin’s in the middle of warning him, loudly and aggressively, to watch her meal size – when all of a sudden she’s on the other side of the table, much warmer, and hit with a flood of Sasuke’s chakra so strong that the words are washed right out of her. 

_Her_ hands on the table – the sleeves of _her_ lilac uniform – _her_ hair loose around her shoulders – and _her_ glasses, so smudged and dusty and smeared with fingerprints that the asshole on the opposite bench is hardly more than a blur of white and violet. 

Suigetsu lets out a cry of sheer delight. His sword is where Karin left it, lying in the dirt beneath the table; he ducks down to check on it and resurfaces, more delighted still. “Fucking _finally_ —!” The celebration falters the moment his eyes meet hers. “Shit,” he says abruptly, and starts scrambling from his seat. 

He’s too late. She dives across their table; the yakiniku grill goes flying, and the shouts of Juugo, of Sasuke, of the customers at other tables, of the kitchen staff – they’re nothing. They’re unimportant. She doesn’t even hear them. She kicks his head in before he’s freed himself from the bench and when his body topples backwards she leaps down after it. _Onto_ it – feet first. He can’t reform if she keeps stamping on him, is what she’s thinking, and with grim determination she puts her plan into action. 

The proprietor of the restaurant comes out after a little while, and hovers nervously just outside the splash radius of Suigetsu’s disgusting lukewarm insides to ask if, maybe, perhaps, they wouldn’t mind leaving the premises – taking it outside – not scaring off all of her customers – and Karin, though fuelled by rage and vengeance and not through with him in the _least_ , graciously condescends to do so. No point wearing herself out, after all. She has the whole night ahead of her – she has her whole _life_ ahead of her – and if she wants to spend it making Suigetsu suffer, she absolutely can. 

“You’re insane,” is the first thing he says, and stays exactly where he is instead of getting up, flopped on the floor of the restaurant, spitting water. 

“ _You_ harassed Sasuke,” she says, and stamps on his stomach one last time, just for the hell of it. 

“You’re _always_ —” he begins, outraged, but Karin has better things to do than waste her time listening to anything Suigetsu has to say, and she’s already gone. 

 

+++

 

Her fury doesn’t fade – her fury will _never_ fade – but there’s no sword harness cutting in across her ribs, and there’s no risk in entertaining daydreams as dirty as she likes, and with the world back as it should be, there’s no urgency to Karin’s temper anymore: She can kick the shit out of him whenever she wants. Night has fallen, and she sits in her sleeping roll and polishes her glasses back to an acceptable state of cleanliness, and considers. Maybe she’ll let him get his guard down. Maybe she’ll strike when he’s sleeping. Maybe she’ll trip him into tomorrow night’s campfire, and keep vengeful watch over the flames as he evaporates. The list of violent possibilities is endless: which is just as it should be, and listing them off to herself is restful, almost soothing, and the peace and quiet around their campfire stretches on, tranquil and undisturbed. 

“You know what I’ve remembered?” Suigetsu says, after a while. “Karin? That inn we stopped at the other night. That nasty shit we got instead of beer. You reckon that could have been it?”

Karin gives it some thought. “You know,” she says, “that _does_ make sense.”

“What does?” says Juugo. “Did something happen?”

“The night before that asshole stole my body,” she says. “It was after you and Sasuke went to sleep – _we_ went to the bar.”

“Yeah,” Suigetsu agrees. “Tried to order beer, but we got this jug of – whatever. Sort of green, smelled like acid.”

“It tasted disgusting,” says Karin. 

“We drank it anyway,” says Suigetsu. 

“Okay,” says Juugo, carefully, “but _why_ would you drink something like—”

“And that would have been about forty-eight hours ago,” says Karin. She considers this, then pushes up her glasses and nods, decisively. “Yeah, it makes sense.”

“No, it doesn’t,” says Juugo, already beginning to feel as though this conversation is slipping helplessly out of control. “What do you mean? – do you think you were poisoned? Or—”

“Don’t question it,” Sasuke says, his voice low. He’s kneeling close to Juugo, spreading his sleeping roll out across the grass. 

“But—”

“Nothing to do with _friendship_ ,” says Suigetsu. He’s sitting up in his sleeping roll, his sword across his lap, clearly extremely satisfied with himself. “Nothing to do with _listening_ to each other. Just shitty alcohol. They’re crazy like that in the mountains, that’s what I’ve always heard.”

“This doesn’t make any sense,” says Juugo. His voice is plaintive. 

“You’re the one who wouldn’t shut up about the power of friendship,” Karin says, not very nicely, “you think _that_ makes any more sense?” – and Suigetsu laughs. He _laughs_! – at something Karin said, rather than laughing at Karin herself!

The feeling that Juugo must have stepped sideways into some unfamiliar new version of reality gets worse. He looks despairingly to Sasuke – but Sasuke shakes his head, very slightly. _Don’t question it_ – okay. Okay. Juugo can do that, at least. If he questions it, it might all fall apart, and however disconcerting it might be for Karin and Suigetsu’s company to ever be _peaceful_ , Juugo can hardly say it’s an unwelcome change. 

After a little while, Suigetsu sets his sword aside. Karin has already flopped down into her sleeping roll, gazing up at the darkening sky with a discomfiting private smirk that Juugo’s choosing not to think about; Sasuke has settled into his sleeping roll too, a map scroll spread open in his lap. It’s unnaturally peaceful; it’s unnaturally quiet. 

Juugo allows himself to hope. He clears his throat. “Do you think you’ve... learned anything? From it?” 

“No,” Karin says decisively. 

“About getting along better?” Juugo persists. “Maybe?”

“I haven’t learned _anything_ ,” says Suigetsu. “Except for a load of stuff about glasses I never wanted to know anyway.”

“Or... understanding each other?” says Juugo, though he’s feeling increasingly less hopeful. “That’s what they, um. Say. That if you walk in someone else’s shoes, then – you’ll start to understand them. And get along. And not fight all the time. And maybe not shout at everyone so much. So... maybe you’ve learned about that?”

“Nope,” says Suigetsu. 

“Definitely not,” says Karin. 

“I mean,” Suigetsu adds, “I _tried_ to understand her, but I had, like – two, maybe even three thoughts every single day that _weren’t_ just about getting with Sasuke, so—”

Karin’s already jackknifed upright. “Yeah, well, I was _never_ gonna understand you – not when _I_ managed to last whole _hours_ without pissing off everyone around me—”

“Trust me, you didn’t—” cut off by the thud of a rock hurled across the clearing, and then manic laughter, and the fury of, “I hope you _die_ —” yelled even louder than before...

“All right, then,” says Juugo, to no one in particular, and the last of his hope leaves him with a tremendous, doleful sigh.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [And finished, at last! Any comments would be appreciated. ♥]


End file.
